Publicly accessible open spaces provide valuable opportunities for people to exercise, play, socialize, and build community. People are more likely to use public open spaces that are close (ideally within walking distance) to their homes, and larger open spaces often provide more amenities. To assess the potential benefit of creating new open space in the southeast US, we identified areas without access to open space within a certain distance category (in this case, 3 miles). Then, for each 30-meter pixel in the study area, we then totaled the number of people within 3 miles who do not currently have access to open space within that distance. This represents the number of people who would benefit from new open space created on that pixel.